Masculinities and Geography

Masculinity is a concept that first and foremost implies that how men and women live and practice their lives is dependent on gender relations. Within these relations, masculinities take place and are expressed through practices that, according to Robert Connell, affect experience, personality, and culture. But the concept also has geographical implications as expressions of masculinities vary from place to place and influence place identities and local ongoing negotiations within existing gender relations. Masculinity cannot be understood as a singular or a static concept but will vary through space and time.

By focusing on the processes and relationships that define the variations among different masculinities, it is possible to reveal [Page 1866]geographical variations but also difference in status and hegemonic power. Spatial inequalities in the form of dualistic distinctions can, for example, turn into hegemonic versus deviant masculinities. Such a relationship is possible to find, for example, in the relations between urban and rural masculinities; masculinity as hegemonic differs with the geographical and social contexts.

Florida State College football game, 1993. Although rule changes and technological changes have made footfall safer, it remains a violent and predominantly masculine sport. Success at sports, especially football, is a key signifier of success.

Source: AP Photo/Chris O'Meara.

The media are important actors in the construction of the differentiation of masculinities. A recent expression is in the great variety in Western European or Anglo American reality television series. One of the ideas behind shows such as the television reality series Farmer Wants a Wife is to essentialize rural identities and practices as well as demarcate the rural from the urban. Such relations are also expressed in people's daily activities, talk, and discourse. In the process of identifying oneself, one commits to certain, often geographically or culturally based, qualities while distancing oneself from others.

Geographers have taken the spatial implications of masculinities seriously and have focused on the importance of a contextual analysis. A trend that has been accentuated and developed recently is the increasing interest in how the relationship between masculinities and other identity-building dimensions such as class, sexuality, and “race” is constituted. In this understanding, places and spaces are merged with social processes. Thus, taking into account the relational character of identity construction and reconstruction helps avoid the common mistake in defining masculinity by using established divisions of behaviors as male or female.

The strengths of geography in defining and applying a concept such as masculinities are that (a) the discipline pays attention to existing geographical variations and (b) it illuminates the power relations inherent in the relationship between space and identity. By illuminating how space is used to build up discourses of differences, the reproductive as well as the transformative aspects of the concept of masculinities are exposed.